“Some people are starving around the world,” I used to say to myself, when an unfinished meal was thrown away. In the couple times I let this comment slip to other friends, the response was usually the same.

“It’s not like I can send them my food,” or “It’s my meal, I can do what I want with it,” both of which are valid points.

As a young girl, I would sometimes accompany my grandmother to church on Sunday, which always meant attending Sunday school. I always looked forward to Sunday school because the lessons were centred on Bible stories and candies were awarded for memorizing Bible verses. In my youth, believing was joyful and it always included the Bible.

I wasn’t in the habit of regularly going to church until five years ago. I was bored by the Mass as a child and found very little reason to attend if I could help it. As a pre-teen, I openly resisted Christianity. I rarely went to church in those years of adolescent angst. Even when my parents dragged me to church, I felt uhappy to be there.

Conchita D’Souza, a second-year Christianity and Culture student at the University of Toronto, equates voting with flipping a stone into a pond. Each vote can create “ripples that will go towards influencing society,” she said.

It has been a month since recent high school graduates like me began their lives outside of the walls of high school. Be it post-secondary education or the workplace, beginning a new chapter in life is like moving away from a place you once called home. The “real world” — that is, the people and culture outside of your home — is seemingly heedless.

A recent study by the Council of Ontario Universities paints a rosy picture of post-graduate life. Within two years of graduating, 93 per cent of graduates are employed and the average salary for someone working full-time is just under $50,000.

When I was eight, one of my friends made a statement that baffled me: she didn’t know any of her cousins. Growing up, I had this precon-ceived notion that everyone had a large family, and every Sunday my peers, like me, would go to church, walk down to their grand-parents’ house afterwards for brunch and play with their cousins long into the afternoon.